Question

I am trying to wrap my head around serialization. But what happens if for whatever reasons I need to add or remove some values or properties? How will this affect the contents? Or is this not an issue? Or how can I avoid this?

Answer 1

As people already pointed out, it depends on your serializer. XmlSerializer is somewhat easier to handle in this case:

1. The serializer works against the public interface, so if you change the implementation, nothing goes wrong.
2. XML is human-readable and therefore easy to parse by hand or with some XML utilities. Therefore you could write a version converter if everything else goes wrong.

Consider Jon’s anwer for more tips, especially with NonSerialized and OptionalField attributes.